Articles tagged Research Resources
(5 results)

For many of the roughly 300 million people around the world with rare diseases, the road to diagnosis can be long, painful, expensive, and disheartening. Around eighty percent of very infrequently seen undiagnosed diseases are estimated to have a genetic basis, but even with modern DNA sequencing techniques, the causes are often unclear. In these…

Thanks to more than a hundred years of working with Drosophila melanogaster, geneticists have many powerful tools for precisely manipulating its genes. It has also become a model system for studying speciation and molecular evolution together with the other members of the melanogaster species group: D. simulans, D. mauritiana, D. yakuba, and D. santomea. However,…

Off the coast of North America drifts a jellyfish that has unknowingly revolutionized molecular biology. Aequorea victoria produces green fluorescent protein (GFP), a substance that adds a green tinge to the jelly’s bioluminescence, which can sometimes be seen around its margins. By inserting a slightly modified version of the GFP gene into the genomes of…

The National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Biological Sciences (BIO) has put two funding programs on hiatus, pending an evaluation of the “long term resource needs and research priorities” within the directorate. The suspended programs are both within BIO’s Division of Biological Infrastructure (DBI).   Collections in Support of Biological Research (CSBR) The Collections in Support of Biological…

An article in the most recent issue of Science highlights a growing concern about the continued support of the biological databases on which our community depends. Indeed, 2015 GSA President Jasper Rine was quoted as saying these resources are “critical for our daily life as geneticists and biomedical researchers.” Many of the model organism databases (MODs) used…